Interesting article/interview by BBC Picture Editor Phil Coomes about /with Daniel Meadows, pioneer of digital storytelling in UK, particularly with Capture Wales
Author Archives: Liz Milner
Magnum Contact prints
Contact prints were such a feature of work and personal practice, along with all those chinagraph and felt-tip pen markings and scribbles, they were an index of my life; more on this topic at some other point maybe, meanwhile I’ll be pleased to take a look at this book of Magnum photographers’ contact prints, though maybe won’t be buying it at £45!
Lytro
Change the focus after you’ve taken the photograph? Tis against nature – or against all the principles of photography I was taught – though I did manage to dispense with many of those eventually! No idea how the technology works though; fascinating!
Watershed: Part-time employment
For 2 days a week I’m the Development Co-ordinator for ‘RELAYS at Watershed’ – a SW Cultural Olympiad project organised by Universities SW and focused on activities for young people. Watershed’s contribution to this programme is to work with young people in a range of settings to create projects that explore the meeting of sport and media/culture.
Activities I’ve been involved with over the last year include a short film project Short Cuts, Media Literacy Workshops for schools – just starting to plan these for 2012 – and a citizen journalism project that’s leading up to taking a group of young people to the Olympic sailing and cultural events that will be taking place in Weymouth in 2012. I’m also covering the developing phases of this citizen journalism project in a blog.
Here’s an audio slideshow that gives a flavour of the Media Literacy strand of this project and demonstrates the enthusiasm that can be sparked in teenagers when you put them into a new setting with some interesting challenges and stimulating people! I took the photographs and recorded the audio during the series of workshops we ran in 2009 with local secondary schools and put them together in Soundslides to help promote future workshops to schools in the Bristol area. The workshops were led by David Goldblatt and assisted by volunteer production staff from the BBC.
Producing digital stories for M Shed
Hartcliffe and Withywood Dad’s breakfast Club / Champloo B-boy and B-girl
I’ve been working on some freelance commissions for Bristol’s new museum and produced two sets of short films/digital stories sporting and family stories… Continue reading
Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century
Really absorbing exhibition at Royal Academy – “Brassaï, Robert Capa, André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy and Martin Munkácsi each left Hungary to make their names in Germany, France and the USA, and are now known for the profound changes they brought about in photojournalism, as well as abstract, fashion and art photography.”
First photography exhibition there for years and full of luminous prints (not so sparkling towards the chronological end of the show though) and intense images in a whole range of genres reflecting the country’s troubled shifts of politics and an identifiable eastern European preoccupation with form and design.
Good review here by Laura Cumming, Observer.
‘Luminous Lint – for connoisseurs of fine photography’
Some real gems on this site, including this revealing online gallery – John Loengard: Celebrating the Negative, my favourite is Cartier Bresson’s Gare St Lazare.
The revelation for me was that you can see how much of the negative has been cropped at the bottom and left side in the prints of this familiar and iconic image – I was at a photography college (a long, long time ago) where the frame was sacrosanct – you didn’t crop, you put your negative in a holder that was a bit larger than than the neg size and allowed the light passing through the clear rebate to create a dense black frame round your image to prove you had kept it intact; a curious form of celibacy; took me years to reject the concept.
By contrast, but a great companion to the above – less ‘fine photography’ but lots of fun, and food for thought: Red Bubble recreates famous photographs – with lego
Particularity
It’s taken me years to understand that something that has significant creative appeal for me is ‘the particular’. I’d grappled unhappily with a comparable, but oppositional concept – ‘the transcendent’ on a photographic course years ago (another time) but it was only recently that I began to read more thoroughly about the work of artists I have long admired and saw the unifying qualities they shared. One writer who’s illuminated this route for me is Ian Jeffrey (can’t find sensible link for the man – suggestions welcome) whose succinct insights are delivered in a thoroughly readable, and often wry style, not tethered to impenetrable cultural theories, but fluid observations of artists’ work in the context of their time and place. Continue reading
National Trust – ‘Tyntesfield through the Lens’, September 2010
A section of the montaged artwork created from photographs taken by young people from Westhaven and Aschcome schools for the ‘Tyntesfield through the lens’ project.
I worked with the National Trust’s learning officer at Tyntesfield (in conjunction with the North Somerset Find Your Talent initiative) to devise and deliver a workshop over 3 sessions at the house and estate. The participants were Year 6 children from Ashcombe Primary school, and GCSE Photography students from Westhaven special needs Secondary school who were to mentor the younger pupils. The older students came on their own for a first visit to see the house and gardens, learn about some of the history and take photographs of their own, but with our support they also planned how they would guide the younger pupils round the house and estate on the following visit and help them to use cameras to create a ‘portrait’ of Tyntesfield. Continue reading
Performers and performances
A strand of work that’s parallel to documenting artists and makers is photographing actors, dancers and artists’ performance-based work in the Bristol area – some examples follow…
For Theatre Orchard Project – ‘I Peaseblossom, I Caliban’ on tour in North Somerset, 2011 and 2012.
There are lots more photos from this lovely tour over on The Theatre Orchard’s flickr site, here, here and here, Continue reading
